Ellen Hinsey Books

Focusing on the profound insights of Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova, the book offers an extensive interview that explores the intersection of Eastern European postwar history, dissidence, and literature. Venclova's connections with notable literary figures and his role in founding the Lithuanian Helsinki Group highlight his commitment to human rights and artistic resistance against totalitarianism. This work delves into Venclova's ethical choices and artistic contributions, enriching our understanding of his impact on contemporary European culture.

Presents an exploration of the extremes of the human condition, tackling issues of civil strife and tyranny, reconciliation and the renewal of the spirit.

In this exquisitely coherent new collection of poems, Ellen Hinsey explores the boundary between poetry and metaphysics, and the intimate bonds between morality and mortality. Drawing on philosophical and spiritual readings, The White Fire of Time displays a breadth of cultural knowledge and a deep understanding of the wisdom of the body. The poems in this book-length sequence are gorgeous, brooding, musical, elegant and serious. The work is composed in three sections: The World, meditations on the ordinary, the daily life of the body and its place in nature and time; The Temple, investigations into language and the ethical life; and The Celestial Ladder, in which poems trace the soul's spiraling journey through desire, love, grief and endurance. Each section mirrors the structure of the whole, with poems following specific forms, serving to create a symphonic rhythm in which details, metaphors and meanings build and interweave.

Winner of the 2017 Paris Book Festival in General Non-FictionOver the last decade Ellen Hinsey has traveled across Central and Eastern Europe researching a critical shift in the European political the rise of illiberalism. A quarter of a century after the changes of 1989 and as former Soviet sphere societies come to terms with their histories the specters of populism, nationalism, extreme-right parties, and authoritarian rule have returned in force. Through a series of eyewitness reports, Mastering the Past offers an insider's view of key political events, including the 2012 Russian elections, the Polish presidential plane crash in Smolensk, and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's vision for a new Hungary. Hinsey explores the darkening hour of European politics with an incisive mind and an eye for detail, recording the urgent danger that illiberalism represents for the new century.

Ellen Hinsey's new book-length sequence, The Illegal Age, is a powerful investigation into the twentieth-century's dark legacy of totalitarianism and the rise of political illegality. It explores the enduring potential for human beings to set neighbour against neighbour and commit final acts of violence.

» Bei der Hand hat sich nichts geändert. Schlägt ihre Stunde, ist sie folgsam und gefällig«, heißt es auf den ersten Seiten von Ellen Hinseys Gedichtband Des Menschen Element, der eine Reise in die Abgründe des menschlichen Daseins wagt und in kristallklarer, fein ausbalancierter Sprache unserer düsteren, von Unfrieden, Gewalt und Populismus geprägten Zeit den Spiegel vorhält. Wie lange noch wird Kain seine Hand gegen Abel erheben, wirft Ellen Hinsey die Frage nach der Natur des Menschen auf. Für sie, die seit Jahren den prekären Transformationsprozess in Mittel- und Osteuropa verfolgt und eine profunde Kennerin der Philosophie, Theologie und Literatur von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart ist, rührt alles vom Unbehagen des Menschen an seiner Existenz her : vom Unbehagen, »in die Welt gewollt zu werden ohne unser Wissen« ; davon, dass der Mensch, um seines Unbehagens Herr zu werden, die Welt in Eigenes und Anderes, Eigenes und Fremdes aufspaltet, anstatt mit dem vorsokratischen Philosophen Parmenides anzuerkennen, dass alles ein Ganzes ist, »eins und zusammenhängend«.